


Every Dalish Curse

by KeeperLavellan



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Confession, F/M, canon-divergent, the truth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 02:10:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3552107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeeperLavellan/pseuds/KeeperLavellan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In another world, Solas chose love over duty. In another world, Lavellan chose to find a blessing in the curse.</p><p>Bit of an Apotheosis drabble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Dalish Curse

Solas moved through the dark and winding cave with the same sort of languid confidence he'd shown that night at the veilfire torch. We walked through water now, where we once walked through snow, into the lush grotto where I’d slain a beast for Judith. Dorian called it a wyvern pit, but it looked otherworldly at dusk— the air thrummed with magic, the hum of cicadas, and the waterfall’s thunder.

“The veil is thin here,” Solas explained. “Can you feel it on your skin, tingling?”

I finally understood why he would not confess to me in Skyhold— quiet conversations could be had anywhere, but deep dreaming required setheneran. He wasn’t going to simply tell me, he was going to show me.

“I was trying to determine some way to show you what you mean to me.”

“I’m listening,” I grinned up at him, wondering if he know how closely his words echoed my thoughts.

“Even so,” he said. “For now, the best gift I can offer is the truth. You are unique. In all of Thedas, I never expected to find someone who could draw my attention from the fade. You have become important to me, more important than I could have imagined.”

Bit by bit he loosened the knot of insecurity that the truth of the Arbor Wilds had tied up inside. It seemed like such a small thing to reciprocate when centuries added a weight to his words that mine could never match, yet I knew it was not a contest.

"As you are to me."

“Then what I must tell you: the truth. Your mark,” he hesitated. “The Anchor.”

My heart twisted. Oh, gods, he knew. “Solas.”

He looked at me with such aching sadness, panic edging into his eyes as they searched my own, and he started to pull away. My stomach turned, and I thought of all the times I’d nearly lost him, all the times he’d tried to deny the thread that ran between us. I reached up to cradle the back of his skull with one hand, letting my thumb rest behind his ear.

A muscle in his cheek twitched, but he did not look away. “I know which elven god the orb belonged to.”

“Did you…something in Mythal’s Temple?”

“I have always known.”

I pressed my forehead into his chest, but the _racing_ of his heart was no comfort. “Always?”

Little pieces shifted into place, revealing what I had not seen at the Well: Pride, like Sorrow, was a Sentinel. Perhaps he’d even been at Cadash when the orb was taken. It would explain what made him risk everything to join the Inquisition, how he knew the way to save me, and why he so desperately hated the Grey Wardens.

I fisted up his tunic in one hand as if that little bit of security would stop him should he decide to run as it always seemed he would.

“I know that you’re elvhen,” I said in a rush, so that he would know I had some context for the confession. 

He cradled my head against him, stroking my hair smooth with his thumb.

“Ar lath ma, vhenan.” He pressed a kiss at the top of my forehead. “Whatever else you think of me when this is done, know that I have never said those words to anyone else.”

“What? Not even _ar lath ma_?”

“I loved nothing but Elvhenan, and I could not allow affection for a single person to diminish that.”

“Because of your duty?” 

“Exactly so.”

“You,” I paused, having never once confronted him on any of the little theories that played out in my mind. “You served the god of the orb?”

“With my whole heart.”

“Just tell me who.”

“Please,” he said more softly than a whisper. “Let me first tell you who _I_ am. Who I was.”

“Were you a high priest?” Wasn't that the term I'd seen in Samson's letter?

A low, tight sound escaped from the back of his throat, “Something like that. Imagine, instead, the magisterium of Tevinter. A powerful class of mages ever grasping for more.”

“You…ruled in Arlathan?”

“Elvhenan, actually, and only a minority vote, but yes.”

I stepped back a pace, then sat heavily on my heels, rocking back carelessly to sit in the grass. It was simply too much. I watched the Divine meet her death, I’d seen King Alistair blush, I’d danced with an Emperor, I’d become leader of the most powerful organization in Thedas— I’d long since eclipsed a girl who would be impressed by a title, but fuck.

Elvhenan was our fairy tale and our history all at once. To know a man who’d lived there was one thing, but to know one of its rulers? Not just know him, but love him? Not just love him, but be loved by him?

Fuck.

“Abelas told you the truth,” he continued. “Elvhenan fell to a war we waged on ourselves.”

“How did it begin?”

“With a slave uprising.”

I looked up at him in shock. Slaves in Arlathan? It was supposed to be our _home,_ it defied all reason that knowledge so damning ever have been lost.

“We really were no better than Tevinter.”

He winced. “Not we, vhenan.”

The implication floated away, abstract, unreal. He’d owned slaves. People. Solas sat beside me in the grass, his knees bent up like my own. He very nearly rested a hand on my thigh, but then reconsidered and looped his arms around his legs.

“Like Dorian, I considered such things a mere facet of life. I’d never known any other way, I thought their service my due. Yet, in time, Wisdom showed me a better path and I set them free. Not only my own slaves but many more.”

I wet my lips, afraid that I read too much into the statement. “That must have been a huge risk.”

“It was reckless," he said, the bitterness in his voice sharp despite the passage of time, "I was very young and let the righteousness of my cause blind me to more practical considerations. I granted their freedom without providing for their future. Apart from a noble’s protection, many of The People fell to disease, starvation, poverty. Others were captured and made slaves once more, or slaughtered, yet their deaths only incited further rebellion, forcing the nobility to retaliate with ever increasing violence.”

My stomach twisted, but I couldn’t fathom the words. They just hung there, somewhere safely out of reach where the meaning couldn’t crush me. His confession went so far beyond anything that I’d ever considered that I could only sit in stunned silence. I’d known Solas only as the man so skilled at plotting and provision that he could play chess without a board.

“I could only take up the mantle I’d been given, protecting those who had thrown off their shackles from those who would see them caged once more. I did what I could to organize the rebellion, find allies among those in the aristocracy who would join us and dismantle those would would not, to arm the rebels would could fight and shelter those who could not. The war lasted nearly a thousand years.”

My stomach twisted once more, but I couldn’t fathom the words. A thousand years of death and dying, with no shemlen quickness to blame. Only a wish gone wrong…

“The nobility accused me of high treason and put a bounty on my head, as well as those who fought at my side. The rebels accused me of betrayal, for they had flocked to my banner for salvation. To both sides I was a traitor, and I knew that peace would cost me everything.”

I remembered the tale of a village nearly swallowed by a great beast, its people willing to call upon whatever darkness could save them, unable to fathom what the felassan would cost.

“You prayed for the Dread Wolf to save you?”

He turned only enough to catch my eye. “Vhenan… I _am_ the Dread Wolf.”

The loathing in his tone caught me unawares, and I twisted to sit on my shins so that I could see him. He’d always made light of the gods, but this was something dark and hateful. I threaded one arm under his so that I could slide a hand around his neck, so that he would know however much his confession overwhelmed me I would not leave him.

“Solas, don’t ever say that. Whatever you did, whatever it took, whatever deal you made, you were trying to do the right thing.”

His eyes were liquid with tears and surely love, but pity too. The same look he’d given me in the stairwell, which could only remind me of what he'd asked me to say. That he’d used me to twist the knife of his own guilt felt like wading into the Fallow Mire.

Very slowly, he took my hand to lay it back down in my own lap. When Solas let go, he wrapped his arms around his legs once more, then rested his head on one knees. He looked so small, like a little boy lost in the woods.

“It’s not a metaphor, Rial.”

Darkness blurred the edges of my vision. “Stop it.”

“I never meant for this to happen.”

“You can’t possibly…”

Some force wrapped itself around my lungs, driving out the air and crushing my heart into something small. I closed my hands into fists to hide their shaking. The emptiness in each palm reminded me that I had no staff, no protection, and no one knew where we had gone.

_The orb he carries, and its stolen power…that, at least, we may recover_

Oh, gods.

He meant to kill me.

In some distant corner of my mind, I realized that I should run, but my legs were lead beneath me. I determined to allow myself one more of his beautiful lies before halam.

“Did I mean anything to you?”

I couldn’t help but flinch when he reached for me, taking my hand in his to kiss the top of each knuckle. “You are the beating heart of me.”

I shuddered out a breath tangled up with fear and relief, utterly lacking the strength or will to resist when he pressed forward, crawling on hands and knees until I fell back beneath him. He lowered himself onto me and pressed his mouth against my ear.

“You are a rare and marvelous spirit,” he soothed. “In your light, the shadows that blacken my dreams are driven back.”

He gently kissed my eyelids and cheeks, then brushed his lips against my throat. It would be any second now.

But instead of whatever I was expecting, he feathered kisses along my vallaslin.

“I brought you here because I expected you to be furious,” he said by way of explanation. “I wanted to make certain no one would stop you from attacking me. I thought if you saw how equally matched we are in power, you would better understand that I am not what your people claim.”

“You’re—” but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“Old and diminished,” he finished instead. “You are young and gifted, at present far closer to the elvhen notion of divinity than myself. We are set apart only by our nature, and although I would live forever we are just as easily slain.”

He was insane and lying, or Fen’Harel incarnate.

I was panting with fear as the world came undone and the illusion of Solas with it. There was no quiet elven mage, no hunter in the woods. Memories fragmented under the weight of the truth, leaving me on the wrong end of a joke in my fluffy human bed, lost and broken in a stairwell. Everything I’d ever known or loved about Solas had been as finely crafted as any Orlesian mask.

It was grief then, not fear, that broke me, and I had no hope of controlling the sobs. I cried his name over and over again while the man my people called Bringer of Nightmares whispered _emma ir abelas_ a thousand times in a voice more broken than my own.

The world felt swimmy and light and I remained there, cocooned beneath him, wracked by alternating waves of peace and terror. For a moment I’d know with perfect clarity that he was still my vhenan, and in the next I’d trembled to recall everything I’d learned through a Keeper’s eyes.

I was either beloved and precious to _him,_ or the embodiment of every Dalish curse.

Loved or fucked.

What tipped the balance was the voice of Compassion, mournful under a starry sky in the Hissing Wastes: _Bright and brilliant, he wanders the ways, walking unwaking, searching for wisdom._ If Cole could entrust himself to Solas after Adamant...

When I finally caught my breath I pressed a hand to his cheek and trailed my thumb along his lashes to feel hot tears he’d not allowed to fall. It was a moment more until I could trust my voice to speak a truth that would damn and save me.

“Ar lath ma, Fen’Harel.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is an alternate version of Apotheosis [chapter 58](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2760119/chapters/7307633) and references Rial's theory that Corypheus found the orb in Cadash Thaig.


End file.
